The second coming of epigenetic drugs

The second coming of epigenetic drugs. Philip Hunter, EMBO reports (2015) 16, 276-279, DOI 10.15252/embr.201540121

New drugs have been slow to materialize, however, largely because epigenetic mechanisms and their role in gene expression are more complex than originally thought. Apart from modifying the chromatin structure, transcription can also be altered through RNA interference, which has emerged as another important epigenetic mechanism with great therapeutic potential.It operates by silencing genes in the cytoplasm after transcription, or by interfering directly with the transcriptional machinery in the nucleus.